


High and Low

by PennyNamette



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fey AU, Future AU, hella heights like; just soooo tall, ill add more tags later, possible later smut, sort of sci-fi??? but not really
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-24
Updated: 2014-07-24
Packaged: 2018-02-10 05:41:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2013108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PennyNamette/pseuds/PennyNamette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Cosima and everyone live in a city that takes "sky scraper" to a whole new level. Humanity lives in "The Heights", where all there is, is buildings and artificial parks and streets that are more like bridges than anything else. Below is the Deep CIty, a place run through by growth and decay, and is forbidden.</p><p>Cosima's heard the "stories" about the Deep City and its mysterious inhabitants, believes them to be true, and tries to find the evidence herself. But the evidence, in the form of a gorgeous blonde fey, finds her instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	High and Low

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly, I don't know aNYTHING about scientific procedure and the internet is constantly sending me mixed information. I am so sorry if anything is ridiculously inaccurate, PLEASE someone tell me.
> 
> And secondly, this is my first time writing OB, and first time writing anything in a super long time (and I'm literal shit at proof-reading). Again, i am so so sorry if the characters or anything is absolute shit. 
> 
> But despite that, I hope you like it~

“What’re we going down here for again?”

 

Cosima shook her head, and stopped on the uneven and moss covered stairs to sigh, before answering. “I've already explained it like, five times Scott. We’re escapading! Like scientists do, and guess what? We’re scientists. Ergo, we escapade.”

 

“No, I get that,” Scott said back, matching Cosima’s exasperated tone exactly, desperately trying to avoid sliding on the steps. The ground was damp with damaged and unreliable concrete, and the only light source they could rely on was the two dim flashlights Cosima picked up at the hardware store on Twenty-First Street. “But I still don’t understand why we’re escapading the Deep City. For one thing, it’s illegal for us to even be down here. And secondly, there’s nothing down here! Just broken floors and overgrown forestry-- nothing we don’t see up above.”

 

“Mmm, but that's were you’re wrong!,” Cosima sang, waving her finger and continuing down the stairs. “See, Scotty, down here there be mysterious creatures, the stuff of myth and legend!”

 

“Oh, God, Cosima,” She mostly felt him freeze behind her rather than saw, and once again she sighed. “I thought you were joking!”

 

His voice ricocheted off the walls around them. They both froze, panicking about either the ancient walls around then to cave or for someone -- or thing -- to leap out at them from the darkness. When nothing happened, Cosima stepped closer to him. “Look, Scott, I know this isn't exactly you’re idea of a Saturday night, but imagine what could happen if we find them!” She raised his eyebrows at him, and continued, “Wouldn't it be totally awesome if, after all those nights masturbating to your poster of Galadriel, you could like meet a lady fey who looked just like her?”

 

Scott shifted his feet and shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, ‘course it’d be awesome, but it’s not gonna happen Cosima -- Fey don’t exist, and even if they did they’d feral and brutal. You heard the stories.”

 

“Weeell” She said, spinning around and heading back down the stairs, unperturbed and still determined. “While you’re probably right on the ‘not seeing them’ front, I don’t think they were made up, or as that one professor says, ‘lies constructed by hippies who try to scare people away from cuttin’ down trees’. I so honestly think there's truth to the stories, I think something did happen and that there’s still fey somewhere down here, in the only place they can survive.”

 

Now at the bottom of the stairs, she stopped and turned, only so slightly, to face Scott. Sincerely, she said, “You can go back, if you want, i’m not gonna force you to come.”

 

Scott frowned, and she was relieved when he answered, “You know I can’t just leave you down here.”

 

So she smiled, threw up a thumps-up, and turned back to the hallway that lead off the stairs.

 

XXXXXX

 

Two hours later, Cosima was buzzing with excitement. They’d made their way deeper, and found an abandoned hall, that was huge, old, and covered in all the things that made it, authentically, part of the Deep City. Things like broken glass and molded through walls, and floors with holes that displayed rusted iron bars and levels of interlacing branches that carried downwards until they she couldn't see any further. Inside the room, too, the branches wove through the room and walls while vines and moss stuck to the walls and ground. Cosima could see it made Scott uncomfortable, and it made sense as he was disturbed by areas that looked like it could kill him, just by him being there, but Cosima found that she actually really loved it.

 

She had never left the Heights -- hell, no one had, Not sense civilization started growing upwards, since there's was no more room to grow out, some seven hundred years ago. Around that time, evolution decided to kick in trees and flowers and shrubbery grew wild and started making its way through the architecture, destroying the buildings stability while also becoming it’s main support system. Mother nature took back what’s hers in a big way, making any areas within five hundred feet of solid earth unpredictable, unmanageable, and therefore condemned by federal law. Also in a big way. She could get ten years for doing what she was doing, actually.

 

That’s part of the reason why she was doing what she was. Why make the penalty so severe, if there wasn't anything to hide?

 

“Because,” Scott started, since she’d said as much to him then. They were surveying a room whose walls were mostly branches and leaves, rather than actual walls, collecting bits of the wood and leaves. The air was moist and smelled of things too old, as opposed to the thin and sharp and too metallic smell of the Heights. “If some dumb college kids, like us, mess with the Deep City and accidentally destroy things down here, it could destroy things up there. Major property damage, not to mention major casualties. Ergo, the ten years in prison.”

 

“But that doesn't make any sense!” She said, gently cutting into one of the branches weaving its way through the walls. “Like, okay, can we take an accidental step and plummet to our death? Yeah. Can we cave the ceiling in just by using the wrong octave? Absolutely. But look at this place! There's no way we can do any large scale damage without setting a mile of this place on fire. Maybe. You remember what that Botany Professor said-- the trees support everything, and they’re everywhere!”

 

“So, what I think is that the whole "you’ll bring down the city" excuse is a ruse, trying to keep up from being curious. I think that the big guys are hiding something, or someone. Or many someones, actually.” She pried the piece of bark she cut away from the main limp with a pair of forceps, and wet sap seeped from the wound. “Ah, sweet! Sap!” She said. She pulled out a vial and placed the lip just under the viscous fluid.

 

On the other side of the room, Scott opened his mouth but froze, when out of the corner of his eye he saw something shuffle away, behind a broken window.

 

“Uh, Cosima?...”

 

“Huh?” She responded, intent on her sap situation. Scott didn't reply immediately, instead stepping forward cautiously, staring. The entire place gave him the eeby-geebies and the window -- framed by dirty and broken glass, with nothing visible past it save for thick green vines and gnarled bark and incredibly black, endless darkness -- made it about a thousand times worse.

 

“Scott?” Cosima asked, curious by his silence, and turned to face him. When she noticed him staring into the window she walked over, whilst twisting a cap on the vial of sap. She stood next to him and looked through the window. “Whats up?”

 

“...Uh...,” distracted, as he was, it took a minute for him to register Cosima said anything at all. He shook his head and said, “Uh, nothing. This place is freakin’ me out, Cosima.”

 

“You wanna leave? Already?”

 

“Yeah, it took us and hour to get down here -- what with all the stairs and such. It’s almost eleven, and I have a test tomorrow, please can we leave?”

 

“Alright, let’s bail.” she hopped cautiously over to her bag and slung it over her shoulder. Separately, she picked up a different bag, containing all the things she’d collected, like the moss and mold, leaves and bark, and plopped the vial inside. She held it up and smiled, “This is more than enough of a start anyway.”

 

She hopped back over, passed Scott and made her way back to the hallway they entered from, while Scott gathered his things and asked, “What about finding Fey?”

 

“I did say you were probably right on the ‘not seeing them’ thing. Besides, I promised Alison I’d check in before one, and I don’t plan on upsetting her anytime soon. That woman is _wicked_ scary when she wants to be.”

 

XXXXXX

 

“You are cutting it _very_ close, Cosima.”

 

Despite making it back solidly at twelve forty-nine, even after dropping by her apartment three levels down from Alison’s place, Alison still managed to be upset. Though, this was the You-Made-Me-Worry-And-Now-I’m-Dissapointed upset rather than the angry, more volatile upset, and somehow that was worse.

 

“I’m sorry, I got carried away.” She leaned forward and hugged her, her usual way of apologizing to Alison. As always, Alison awkwardly patted her on the back like she really didn’t want or like her hugs, but Cosima felt her loosen and slightly lean into it. Cosima smiled against her hair before pulling away.

 

“Well, you’re back anyhow, in one piece. How was your, ah... trip?” She asked, while turning on her heels to the walk through the halls to the kitchen, and Cosima followed.

 

“Yeah, it was totally amazing down there, you should’ve seen it. All we have up here is artificially grown trees and shit, which isn't bad you know, I mean we need it and the city does a great job at landscaping the parks, but it was so raw, you know? No planning or-”

 

“Oi, Cosima!,” A new voice interrupted her, as she and Alison rounded the corner to the kitchen and there sitting around the table was Sarah and Felix, sporting a beer and a martini, respectively. “Come ‘ere and hang.”

 

“Oh, hey guys.” She said, walking over. She pulled out a chair just as Felix asked, “Drink? Alison’s got loads of boozies if you’d like any.”

 

Cosima laughed when Alison shot him The Look, and asked, “Any wine left?”

 

Felix grinned, and went and grabbed it out of the cabinet. The three of them took turns asking Cosima about her ‘trip’ down to the Deep City -- a trip that Alison never approved of but failed to stop her from doing, and that Sarah and Felix now high-fived her for. If it was daring and illegal, she could always count of those two to always back her one hundred percent.

 

She enjoyed telling them about it, like how much of a labyrinth the whole place was, and how the many floors had been so warped by time and nature that she and Scott had to make their way through sloping, compact hallways one minute and then slowly making their way over the trunk of a tree that had managed to lean across two buildings twenty feet apart. That part had Alison staring at her with horror, especially when she’d described how she could see endless levels of ruin and branches below her.

 

After, though, they moved on to their lives, which Cosima loved to hear. Alison was still having her issues with Donnie, saying he never properly looked after her kids or talked to her, always sitting in front of the TV or ‘fooling around at work’. Sarah was getting used to her newest relationship, Rachel, which always seemed complicated and every time she saw them together they acted as if they’d love to kick the other in the groin. But Cosima figured they might truly care for each other, having watched them interlock their pinkies or throw each other glances when they thought no one was looking. They were both hard in their own ways, but seemed soft as pudding when they were together, in a bizarre way.

 

Kira was about to start fourth grade, and Sarah was freaking out about potential bullies -- “It’s when I started sluggin’ fuckers, what if someone tries to do that to Kira??” -- while Felix and Alison tried to ease her mind. Cosima asked Felix who he was getting on with this week, and he laughed at her and asked her why she thought there was only ‘one’. They talked and laughed for another two hours, until it was close to three and all four of them were sluggishly drunk and in need of water and a nap.

 

Cosima waved good-bye at the door, wishing everyone a good night, and left for home. It took her longer than it really should have, since she had to take three Lifts to get to get back to East Lower Brooke and she was having trouble remembering the time they arrived or even where they were. Soon enough though, she managed to get there in one peace. Looking around her apartment, with a large living room but small kitchen and lofted bed, big enough to fit a queen, she thought that although the Deep City was a trip she was eager to get back too, home was sweet.

 

Setting both her bags on her table, she rolled her neck and walked to her fridge, pulled out a water bottle, and headed up the storage stairs to her bed.

 

She froze on the fifth step, where she could just see bed. Laying there was a woman-- long and lithe, with white skin and legs that stretched beautifully across her sheets. She had golden hair that fell over her shoulders while she leaned forward, caressing a book between her fingers. All of her seemed ethereal and perfect, and impossibly fictitious, an image that was solidified by the fact that, from the rolls of her head, there were two curved and perfectly symmetrical antlers, curving out and around her crown.

 

When Cosima gasped, she looked up from the book perched in her hands. Her eyes were bright and brown, and when she smiled Cosima felt as if she was falling.

 

Though, by the time the she realized she was _actually_ falling, It was too late to catch herself and the last thing she saw was the beautiful woman’s face melt into shock and worry as she lunged forward to try to catch her.

**Author's Note:**

> I Like to name chapters after songs; This one is So High, by Ghost Loft.


End file.
